The cell drill-down

Flowtly Editorial Team5 min

Every cell on Capacity by project is a number that came from somewhere. Select one and a panel opens on the right saying where — the sum written out, not the total repeated in a bigger font.

Select a cell to open it, or press Enter or Space while it has focus. Close, Escape or a click outside dismisses it.

The panel reads the plan; it does not change it. Confirming, un-confirming, extending and deleting a booking all stay on the grid. The one exception is an empty cell, which offers Declare a need — and that opens the usual dialog rather than editing in place.

This is the Projects view. Cells on Capacity by person do not open a panel.

What every panel shows

At the top: what the cell is about, the same meter the cell drew — redrawn rather than replaced with a different kind of chart — its value, and the period the column covers.

Under that sit three figures, and they differ by the kind of row you opened. Each one gives the percentage and the hours behind it.

Then the sum itself, headed Where 50% comes from, followed by the rows it is made of.

A role's cell: is this covered, and by whom

The three figures are Confirmed, Draft and Gap.

Gap is not the same as the open hatch on the grid, and the difference is the useful part. The hatch is demand that is not confirmed. The gap is demand that nobody has even been proposed for. A role asking for 100% with nothing confirmed and one person proposed at 50% shows a full hatch on the grid — a proposal is not coverage — and a Gap of 50% in the panel. The hatch says this is not staffed. The gap says this is what nobody has so much as suggested a name for, which is the half you can act on today.

Who is in this role lists everyone contributing, each marked Confirmed or Draft with their share as a percentage and in hours. Where a gap remains, it gets a line of its own — Nobody · the remaining demand on this role — so an outstanding gap is shown rather than only counted.

A project's cell: which role is the problem

A project row is the mean of its roles, and a mean is precisely the number you cannot take apart by looking at it. 50% is equally two roles half-staffed and one role full, one role empty, and those two need opposite decisions.

The figures are Demand, Staffed and Coverage, and the sum is written out: (100% + 0%) ÷ 2 roles = 50%, with the hours beside it. Where the roles are not uniform the panel says so and counts them — 2 of the 3 roles are covered and 1 is not — and Roles that produced the mean lists each one with its own bar.

Drafts stay outside the mean, and the panel names the figure it is declining to use: what the coverage would read if proposals counted. A project should not look better staffed on the strength of a proposal.

Only roles carrying demand that period are in the mean. A role not running yet does not dilute it, and does not appear as a 0% term.

A person's cell: what else is on them

Expand a role and each person booked on it gets a row. That cell shows their share of this project — and because the grid is organized by work, everything else they are on is on another row, or hidden by the project filter, or off screen entirely. The panel is where it comes back.

The figures are Share here, Available and All commitments.

Everything Anna Kowalska is on in W35 lists every project and role they hold that period — the one you opened first, then the rest heaviest first, each confirmed or draft. The sum is written out across all of them and compared with what their week is actually worth after leave, so a person quietly at 130% across four projects reads as that rather than as four reasonable-looking cells.

Colours match the project bands on the grid. Beyond four projects at once, colour can no longer tell them apart reliably, so further lines carry a dashed empty square instead of a repeated colour and the panel says why. A recycled colour would claim the wrong project; a name never does.

Leave

Every panel ends with Leave in this period: how many of the period's working days are approved leave, and the planned-against-available reading that follows from it. Leave removes capacity rather than shading over it, so the overlap between leave and a booking is the conflict, stated in words.

Where nobody is away, the section says so instead of being absent — Nobody here is on leave in W35 is an answer, and a missing section is not.

The weeks inside a fortnight

At the 90 days zoom each column is a fortnight, showing the average of its two weeks and flagged if either one is over capacity. The average is exactly what hides which week that was.

So a drill-down on a fortnight adds The weeks inside this period, naming each week with its own bar and marking the ones over capacity. When there is one to see, that section opens already expanded — the reason to drill into an averaged cell is usually to find it.

An empty cell opens too

A cell with nothing in it is not a dead click. It opens on Nothing declared here and says which fact that is: no demand declared and nobody booked on this project, or on this role, or simply that this person is not booked on this project that week.

An empty cell is also the one place the panel offers an action: Declare a need, which hands off to the same dialog as everywhere else. See Setting a role's demand. It needs the Resourcing Approver role.

Hours beside percentages

The plan is held in percentages; the hours beside them are derived, to make a share of a week concrete — 43% = 17.2 h/wk. They are worked out against a full-time 40-hour week.

One figure deliberately has no hours: a project's Coverage. It is a mean of percentages, and converting it would name a number of hours nobody is actually booked for.

Working with the keyboard

Cells are part of the grid's own keyboard order, so the arrow keys reach them and Enter or Space opens the panel on the focused one. Each cell announces what opening it will show — the row, the period and the current value — and an empty cell announces that there is nothing declared, rather than passing as an unlabelled cell.

Example use cases

  • Open a role reading 0% and find that someone is already proposed for half of it, so the real gap is smaller than the grid's hatch suggests.
  • Open a project at 50% and see in one line whether that is two half-staffed roles or one unfilled one.
  • Open a person's cell and find the three other projects that add up to the week they appear to have room in.
  • Open a fortnight that looks fine and find the single week inside it that is over capacity.
  • Check what a cell's percentage is in hours before promising a delivery date on it.

Connection map

Derived fromPart ofRefers toFulfilsUses upPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
job-size sizes capacity. project needs role. role drawn from position. role declares demand. booking fills role. booking books person. absence reduces capacity. booking consumes capacity. bench derived from capacity. booking planned vs actual time-entry.sizesneedsdrawn fromdeclaresfillsbooksreducesconsumesderived fromplanned vs actualJJob Size — The employment capacity an agreement commits to, in hours and minutes per week. The FTE percentage is calculated from it rather than entered: someone whose hours per week equal their job size is full-time.Job SizeCCapacity — A person's contracted week, less absence. Bookings are measured against their own contracted week, so 20 hours fills 83% of a 0.6 FTE and not 50%.CapacityPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectRRole — One job to be done on a project. It may be open, partly filled, filled or over-filled, and it exists whether or not anyone is booked on it.RolePPosition — The catalogue of job titles a project role is drawn from.PositionDDemand — What a role needs, stated apart from who is doing it. Stored as one slot per full-time person, so 2.5 people is three slots. A role with none declared is treated as one full-time person.DemandBBooking — One person committed to one role for a stretch of weeks, at a percentage of their time. A booking is a plan, not a record of work done.BookingPPerson — An employee. The central record the rest of the workforce data hangs off — profile, documents, leave, benefits, rates.PersonAAbsence — Approved time off. It removes hours from a person's week before any booking is counted against it.AbsenceTThe bench — Everyone with room left in the period on screen, most free first. Derived from capacity on every period change; never a list anyone maintains.The benchTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entry